Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev.Wright

...In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obamaâs relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obamaâs conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, âFred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares â and call them racists.â...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obamaâs political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obamaâs pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacherâs rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obamaâs campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long â nearly a year since Wrightâs remarks became public â to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, âDo you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?â

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. âGeorge [Stephanopoulos],â fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is âbeing a disgusting little rat snake.â

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obamaâs relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obamaâs conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, âFred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares â and call them racists.â

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Gee, doesnât that sound familiar?

One of their efforts was completely public. Journolist members collaborated on an open letter criticizing ABCâs Charlie Gibson for asking questions about Wright during ABCâs presidential debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton. The letter eventually appeared in the New York Times, and while it could be argued that a campaign by professional journalists to tell ABC not to ask tough questions about a candidateâs links to radicals is a rather strange idea, it isnât any different than any other collaboration on an open letter. The Journolist listserv probably made the process a little more efficient, but the end result was public and obviously the result of a collaboration.

Ackermanâs attempt to rally his colleagues into another strategy entirely â the racist attack â was deliberately political:

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game theyâve put upon us. Instead, take one of them â Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares â and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

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Letâs put this in its proper perspective. Ackerman wasnât talking about a strategy to expose real racists, in the media or anywhere else. The Washington Independent reporter wanted to conduct a campaign against any figure on the Right, including journalists like Fred Barnes, to smear him as a racist for the political purposes of electing a Democrat to the White House. Notice that Ackerman doesnât even bother to ask people to look for actual evidence of racism, but just suggests to pick a conservative name out of a hat. Tellingly, the pushback from members of Journolist had less to do with the outrageous idea of smearing an innocent person of racism to frighten people away from the story than with whether it would work. Mark Schmitt, now at American Prospect, warned that it âwouldnât further the argumentâ for Obama, and Kevin Drum objected because playing racial politics would âprobably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly.â

Update: But was the campaign effective? Ed Driscoll put together a video showing the correlation of this effort on Journolist and the declaration by CNN that it would be a âWright-free zone.â Correlation isnât causation, but this is a pretty interesting juxtaposition.

Update II: There is something to keep in mind in this particular story, which is that the people involved in the specific conversations regarding the smear are all opinion journalists, and not people filling roles in objective reporting. The Prospect, the (Washington) Independent, and the Nation are all publications with an explicit point of view, although the Independent offers a little more of a pretense of traditional reporting. That doesnât relieve them of responsibility for proposing and/or considering an odious smear campaign, but it does make it difficult to tie this to other journalists filling a different role.

Of course, those journalists in different roles who participated in Journolist, assuming any did, didnât exactly leap to expose this smear attempt, either. And we havenât seen the last of the Daily Callerâs Journolist stories, either.

Another day, another right-wing media freak out. Today, the right is in a tizzy over a Daily Caller exclusive scoop that "documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright." Except, of course, their "documents" show no such thing.

The Daily Caller purports to have obtained copies of emails from the "Journolist" listserv, which they report is "comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists." Their big, breaking story exposes that some liberal journalists and a professor were outraged by an April 2008 Democratic Presidential primary debate -- a debate that was widely criticized as being "specious and gossipy." As you may recall, during that debate Obama was asked questions such as, "do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?"; "how do you convince Democrats" that not wearing an American flag lapel pin "would not be a vulnerability?"; and "Can you explain" your "relationship" with Bill Ayers, a question that was literally suggested to moderator George Stephanopoulos by right-wing radio hosts.

The debate was, in a word, ridiculous. And numerous media figures agreed. The Daily Caller highlights portions of the purported Journalist emails which showed several participants discussing how best to frame and word an open letter to ABC News condemning the debate. Each of the media figures mentioned in the Daily Caller report was an opinion columnist or a blogger. Hardly the stuff of a mainstream media conspiracy, though the Caller desperately tried to paint it as such. They specifically said that journalists from Time and Politico were involved in the discussion, but the article provides absolutely no evidence to back this up.

So, yes, it appears that the big scandal is that liberal journalists and professors talked to each other about how to frame a publically released letter to ABC News. Stop the presses!

Expanding on the stupidity of the Daily Caller report is the fact that many of these same journalists were very clear and very open about their displeasure with the ABC news debate at the time.

The Guardian's Michael Tomasky called the debate "awful" and chided the media for pushing "this kind of guilty-by-association" attacks, as ABC did by questioning Obama's relationship with Ayers. He also said of the debate: "The main point is how poorly the inanity and irresponsibility of this approach serves a country in which people are genuinely worried about genuinely important things." Salon's Joe Conason assailed "[t]he sorry performance of ABC anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos" and predicted that it "should serve as a signal of the coverage to come. Playing gotcha with Democrats and patty-cake with Republicans will remain basic operating procedure for the mainstream media this year, no different from the past half-dozen presidential campaigns -- except that the additional bias in favor of John McCain may make a bad situation worse."

Yet, to the right, the Daily Caller's story is nothing short of a revelation. Andrew Breitbart cites it as "prov[ing] beyond a shadow of doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged againsta all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy." He calls the journalists on the listserv "nothing but street thugs" who "deserve the deepest levels of public consternation." He then adds:

The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?

Off with their heads!

Erick Erickson claims "it was as we all expected," "members of the media plotted to shut down coverage of Jeremiah Wright." Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft declares "Journolist exposed: Documents prove leftist media hacks buried Rev. Wright story during election." He also describes the story as "the death of journalism," adding "Leftist media hacks on the national scene buried the Jeremiah Wright story to protect their favored candidate." And, of course, Hoft adds some video of Jeremiah Wright, just for fun. Proving once again that right-wing blogs drive their news coverage, Fox News has picked up the nonstory. Fox & Friends stooge Steve Doocy teased a report on the story by saying, that the media was "plotting top kill negative stories about" Rev. Wright "to protect the White House." From Fox & Friends:

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game theyâve put upon us. Instead, take one of them â Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares â and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Who cares. Don't fall into the leftist trap of race baiting. They are trying to make all this about race instead of about big government... They think they can win that way, and they may have a big suprise if they succeed. However, it's to the detriment of progress either way. This is not about race and never was.